


the salt seeps in

by nonbinarywithaknife (littleboxes)



Series: just let them REST alex [3]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Class Swap!, First Meetings, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Light Angst, One Shot, Sad with a Happy Ending, Self-Discovery, fudging a LOT of backstory, light mentions of drowning but nothing graphic, ~Magic~
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 15:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21038198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleboxes/pseuds/nonbinarywithaknife
Summary: grizzop still gets taken in by the cult of artemis, but he can feel the ocean buzzing in his blood.





	the salt seeps in

**Author's Note:**

> guess who went ham with the list of sorcerer bloodlines! i was tempted to do celestial or phoenix and i still might but then i thought about what few backstory crumbs i have for grizzop and decided OCEAN.

Grizzop is young. Not even a foot tall, bright red eyes the biggest part of his face. He’s tumbling and wrestling with the others in his clutch, in their cavern, his home, and his life is perfect. His ears perk, as do the others’ and he hears a new sound. Like the river they bathe in, but louder, quicker. Like a rumble. His clutch starts to scream, and he can hear the adults yelling, running, grabbing, but the sounds hurt his ears, echoing louder and louder in the cavern, and the river-sound is _wrong_, now, too loud, almost angry, and then Grizzop and his clutch are swept away.

(Later, he will learn. _Stay calm_, _don’t struggle_, _breathe with the flow of the water so you don’t drown_. But Grizzop is so young, and small, and he’s scared and in pain and he can’t breathe and he wants his brothers and sisters but when he reaches out he can’t _find_ them, and Grizzop has never been _alone_ before.)

Grizzop wakes up on the edge of a pond, only half on land. He coughs and coughs and coughs up water (he doesn’t know, yet, that he shouldn’t be alive. That he is miles and miles from his clutch’s cavern, that lungs as little as his would have given out hours ago, that the water he’s coughing up is salty in a way that underground rivers aren’t- but that oceans are.)

Finally, he drags himself onto land. And he is alone. He curls in close, and whimpers, and hopes that his siblings will find him. They’ve never left him alone, before.

(His siblings don’t come. No one does. Grizzop spends the night alone in the woods, ears twitching with every howl of a wolf, shivering more with fear than with cold.)

(In the morning, a hunter of Artemis will pass by a pond, hoping to clean themselves after a long night of chase. They will hear the sound of a crying child, and freeze. After several minutes of searching, they will nearly give up, before they see a green ear poking out from a little hollow by the pond. They will find a small goblin child, soaking wet, alone, mumbling in a language they don’t understand but with a tone that’s universal. They will offer the child food, and a blanket, and in a week’s time Grizzop will arrive in Amsterdam’s temple of Artemis.)

Grizzop grows up learning about Artemis. About the hunt, the tenets, _guard the pack, remember the slight_. He takes comfort in it, wears a pendant around his neck and holds it, sometimes, when at night he can feel himself being swept away.

But.

He never feels the moonlit power that the paladins tell him about. The divine hand of Artemis never rests on his shoulder, like it does on the clerics’. They tell him that one day he will make a fine paladin, should he choose that path, and Grizzop doesn’t have the heart to tell them, his family, that it’s not moonlight he feels in his blood, but the ocean.

When Grizzop dreams of being swept away, it’s never fear he feels- at least, not in the water. Fear of being alone, yes, of separation. Helplessness. But of the water? Grizzop floats under the waves and feels nothing but calm. The feeling of being _home_.

As it turns out, he never has to tell them. Instead, when he is out practicing with his bow, Vesseek slips by the riverbank. They manage to right themselves just fine, of course, but their arm goes wide and Grizzop gets caught unawares. He gets knocked into the raging current before Vesseek can even shout, and suddenly he’s two years old again, and the water is circling him, whispering, comforting.

_Breathe in, _it whispers_, trust us, you are ours, you are home, reach out and take what is yours_, it whispers, and Grizzop does.

He gasps in a breath, and breathes in river-water and doesn’t choke. Doesn’t drown. He lets the current take him until the river slows, and then climbs out. It’s not until his head breaks the surface, though, that he realizes what he’s done. He feels his throat with his claws and looks at his choppy reflection and sees _gills_ on his neck, and it takes an awkward second above water before he can breathe air again.

That feeling of _home_ and _trust_ and _wild_ rushes out of him, but not completely. Now, there’s a buzz under his skin, a shifting and a vastness that makes him think of the ocean he’s never seen. He looks closer at his hand and realizes that it has more of a blue tint than it used to. Nothing obvious, but a change nonetheless. He doesn’t understand it, any of it, but it wasn’t Poseidon he’d felt. No, it had been _the ocean_, and somehow, a bit of it was- was _inside _him, a _part_ of him, and it- it feels like _home_.

Grizzop starts the long trek home, and arrives at the temple past sunset. He’s still soaking wet, despite having walked a mile, and the paladin who opens the door gasps when she sees him. He smiles, tilts his head, and when Vesseek catches sight of him, they barrel into him, squeezing tightly. Grizzop squeezes back just as tight.

It’s not long after that Grizzop leaves for the coast. Within a day, he’s arrived in Felixstowe after an uneventful ferry ride. (Other than the elderly human man who had cursed at him in dutch, and who had looked very surprised when Grizzop cursed back.)

He wanders around the UK for a while after that, sticking mostly to coastal towns. Practices with the buzzing in his blood, tries to read books on magic and wizardry and spells and gives up after a wasted day in the library. After a few months he finds himself in London of all places, looking for work.

He meets a cleric named Zolf (a cleric of _Poseidon_, of course. Because Grizzop _cannot _catch a break. He doesn’t know how well the cult would react to Grizzop’s, whole, _thing_, and he has spent a fair amount of effort making sure to avoid finding out. When Zolf asks what he can do, Grizzop pulls out his bow and makes a few decent shots. Zolf nods, and Grizzop doesn’t volunteer anything more.)

They end up in an alley, <strike>doing crowd control</strike>, shooting down men in suits chasing a very shady looking woman, and then Grizzop’s bowstring snaps- _really?!_\- and he panics and suddenly the wrist of the man he’s grabbing starts to blur. Where once there was skin starts to dissolve, melt, and then water drops onto the ground, and the man screams.

By the end of it, Sasha has agreed to join their company, and Zolf just gives him a raised eyebrow at the faint scent of ocean that’s surrounding Grizzop. Grizzop looks at himself, at them, and thinks that maybe he could get used to being part of a mercenary company.

(They’ll need a name, though. He wonders if he should bring that up with Zolf, or wait until they can work on it.)

**Author's Note:**

> grizzop casts dissolving touch which i *believe* is a spell like ability (maybe. im a dnd person this podcast is my intro to pathfinder so that could be fucked up) in the alley fight.


End file.
